Saturday, October 04, 2008

We're either intelligent people who look at real data, or people who act on superstitions. Superstitions can take many forms other than religion -- all of liberalism is a superstition based on universal altruism, and it denies science with corresponding fervor -- but religion is a popular one, because religion is determined by the popularity of the crutch it gives many people.

Think about it this way: you can believe in the divinity of life, and even in an afterlife, without believing this whole raft of moral dogma that comes with it.

A group of parents and religious leaders in upstate New York want yoga classes out of public schools, saying the instruction violates boundaries between church and state.

Plans were halted after parents and others in the community complained students were being indoctrinated in Hindu rites.

Parents in Aspen, Colo., were successful in demanding the removal of yoga in the local curriculum in 2002. In Alabama, religious leaders pushed for a 1993 law prohibiting the teaching of yoga in schools, citing connections between yoga and Hindu religious training.

You mean their religion got to a better technology first? If Yoga works, maybe Hinduism works. Interestingly, Hindus view Christianity as a branch of Hinduism, so the animosity is pretty one-sided here.

The nation's largest group of atheists and agnostics is suing President Bush, the governor of Wisconsin and other officials over the federal law designating a National Day of Prayer.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued Friday in U.S. district court, arguing that the president's mandated proclamations calling on Americans to pray violates a constitutional ban on government officials endorsing religion.

The day of prayer, held each year on the first Thursday of May, creates a "hostile environment for nonbelievers, who are made to feel as if they are political outsiders," the lawsuit said.

A team of scientists led by renowned French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio recently announced that they have found a bowl, dating to between the late 2nd century B.C. and the early 1st century A.D., that, according to an expert epigrapher, could be engraved with the world's first known reference to Christ.

If the word "Christ" refers to the Biblical Jesus Christ, as is speculated, then the discovery may provide evidence that Christianity and paganism at times intertwined in the ancient world.

The full engraving on the bowl reads, "DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS," which has been interpreted by French epigrapher and professor emeritus Andre Bernand as meaning either, "by Christ the magician" or "the magician by Christ."

"It could very well be a reference to Jesus Christ, in that he was once the primary exponent of white magic," Goddio, co-founder of the Oxford Center of Maritime Archaeology, said.

Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota) enacts the persistent tendency of white people to wipe their own messes onto the backs of black and brown people. What she's reading into the Congressional Record here is part of an article from a right-wing publication, the Investor's Business Daily, that blames the current financial crisis on "blacks and other minorities," many of whom took out mortgage loans they later couldn't afford. Never mind, she would probably say, that a lot of white people did that too.

The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which Bachmann disparages here, partially corrected a long history of racist lending practices, which kept blacks and other minorities from decent (that is, "white") neighborhoods. In particular, the act outlawed the practice of “redlining,” which happened when banks drew actual red lines on maps around minority areas, and then denied mortgages to people within the red border, even though they qualified for such loans. The real effort of Michelle Bachmann and others currently decrying this Act is to deflect blame from the endlessly greedy white-collar managers and investors who built our collapsing economic house of cards and onto America's ever-ready scapegoat, those racial "minorities."

They also want to shift blame from Republican policies that favor the rich to Democratic ones that favor the poor. You see, it's not the rampant deregulation initiated by Republican free-market advocates during the Reagan Administration that's to blame here, nor, again, the financial industry's leaders and managers whose greed was thereby allowed to run rampant. No, it's Jimmy Carter's fault for getting that Community Reinvestment Act passed, and thus the real fault, after all, of those blacks and other minorities that Democrats are always catering to. It's "those people," who in the collective white imagination always remain reliably "irresponsible." And reliably absolving.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

''Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990's by reducing down payment requirements,'' said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief executive officer. ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

Friday, October 03, 2008

Shive's article actually did use this caricature of pasty white kids to draw an interesting comparison between these white kids’ self-imposed isolation and that of the residents of the racially-themed program house. But in response, there has been no discussion of the merits of his argument. Instead, there have just been cries of "racism."

Invoking racism is like invoking nuclear war. Everyone agrees that both racism and nuclear war are undesirable outcomes, making them easy to exploit....They claim that their position on “diversity” is non-ideological. Yet when others fail to take up their position on program houses—a hot-button political issue on campus—they label it as yet another manifestation of racism rather than a legitimate position....Accusing detractors of hating diversity if they do not support the protestors is like saying someone is un-Christian if they do not support Pat Robertson....There is a tendency to put a blind faith in the value of multiculturalism, not evaluating a work in an objective, scholarly manner, but inadvertently holding it to a lower standard because it promotes multiculturalism.

Teaching well-meaning but unscientific dogma as fact weakens all of our knowledge.

Even if you care nothing at all about issues of race, or are a rabid multiculturalist, you owe it to your species to care that we do not obliterate dialogue with political polarization.

If history is horrible, teaching lies and punishing those who don't uphold them is to repeat the error. Especially if you don't allow someone to say, as I have said:

"Multiculturalism doesn't work. There are no historical examples for its successes, and counterexamples that show how shortly after its adoption, civilizations like Greece and Rome collapsed. Multiculturalism, as a subset of pluralism, is the idea that we can build a society on a lack of consensus on everything except that a lack of consensus is 'freedom.' This neo-Stalinist denial of reality will lead to obliviousness, and in that chaos the worst of human opportunistic behavior will predominate, causing civilization to spiral down to third world levels of dysfunction."

You can say the same for any Big Lie that becomes more important than reality itself. We yell at people for taking drugs, but don't mind drugging ourselves on illusion. Why is that?

Every age has its taboos. In sane ages, those taboos are destructive behaviors. In insane ages, telling the truth is taboo. Are we in an insane age, yet? Here are five ideas you cannot say in public without extreme censure.

1. We have too many people, and most of them are useless. The idea that any individual can be obsolete because he or she is dumb as rocks, which reflects a failed path through evolution, is massively taboo. We're all equal. There's a place for everyone. Granted, it's a crowded, overpopulated place without forests or fish or clean air, but at least we're all included.

2. Evolution had different stages, and some populations represent earlier stages than others. See above, but this argument has the additional stigma of addressing groups. Again, the myth is that the genetic, biological and historical differences between us are just accidents of history, and it's not that history turned out the way it did because of the different actors within. Go read Guns, Germs and Steel, which performs logical contortions to argue that no group has any abilities the others do not.

3. Democracy doesn't work. Essential to our idea of equality and all getting along is the idea that everyone gets a say in how we do things. How egalitarian. How noble. But how flawed, since only about one in ten thousand people has a chance in hell of understanding something as complex as politics. Look around you. These people can't figure out how to get through a traffic light in an orderly fashion. Do you think they're gonna figure out fiat capital, international detente and medical ethics? No.

4. Smart people tend to be happy, healthy, attractive and wealthy, where dumb people tend to be miserable, ugly, of general ill health and impoverished. In other words, poor people got that way for a reason; it's not just an accident. Either they didn't have their act together or they are just plain dumb. Wow, that's really un-PC. But it's true. After years of living in poverty with under-evolved DNA, they're basically the bottom of the barrel scrapings. Oh god, that's so insanely cruel... or just realistic.

5. You can't educate someone into being smarter or more moral. People do not change intelligence. They are as intelligent when they die as when they are born, and no more. You can teach them facts, but if they're dumb, they will not recognize the need to act on those facts and will soon forget them. Similarly, if they are sociopathic or oblivious, you cannot educate them into moral awareness. It's not in their design. Their hardware doesn't support the software you want to load.

These truths, while blasphemous to what the Crowd would like to think, are essential learning for anyone who wants to succeed in life in the old school meaning -- to accomplish something, to have a great family and friends, and to have enough wealth to enjoy life. The Crowd will tell you otherwise, but chances are they're just compensating for their own lack of success with cognitive dissonance, so when they threaten you for speaking these taboos, remember that these people are cornered by denial and they're just having a tantrum. Beat 'em down with logic instead.

A journalist with integrity should publish information which benefits the public even if this would damage his career or access to sources. Likewise, if a politician with integrity existed that politician would push policies which are good for the entire nation even if they are bad for that politican's personal finances, popularity, power etc. An artist with integrity is, likewise, unconcerned with financial benefits, stardom or sex and is instead guided by... by what, exactly? Certainly not by bringing the greatest possible benefit to the broadest possible section of the public. True artists are not supposed to be interested in the public. The artist is supposed to satisfy only himself. But he is only allowed to satisfy himself in ways which don't produce art which the wrong kind of people would enjoy. Satisfying himself by producing art which is liked by the right people (elite critics and other members of big-city arts-and-culture social circles) is fine, though.

Let us suppose that the just and unjust have two rings, like that of Gyges in the well-known story, which make them invisible, and then no difference will appear in them, for every one will do evil if he can. And he who abstains will be regarded by the world as a fool for his pains. Men may praise him in public out of fear for themselves, but they will laugh at him in their hearts (Cp. Gorgias.)

'And now let us frame an ideal of the just and unjust. Imagine the unjust man to be master of his craft, seldom making mistakes and easily correcting them; having gifts of money, speech, strength--the greatest villain bearing the highest character: and at his side let us place the just in his nobleness and simplicity--being, not seeming--without name or reward--clothed in his justice only--the best of men who is thought to be the worst, and let him die as he has lived. I might add (but I would rather put the rest into the mouth of the panegyrists of injustice--they will tell you) that the just man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and will at last be crucified (literally impaled)--and all this because he ought to have preferred seeming to being. How different is the case of the unjust who clings to appearance as the true reality! His high character makes him a ruler; he can marry where he likes, trade where he likes, help his friends and hurt his enemies; having got rich by dishonesty he can worship the gods better, and will therefore be more loved by them than the just.'

In a society where victory is popularity, not being right, you're doomed if someone leaks such a letter, or so they tell you. (Reality is he's not doomed if he stands by it, but if he turns and run, the parasites will smell blood.)

The sad reality is that his analysis is more insightful than what you'll find in the American media.

Obama is a religious symbol for racial reconciliation, and the triumph of Good Intentions over practical politics. If he were Indian, Asian or Hispanic, no one would care as much. If he were white, ditto. But he's from the oppressed minority, so he has guilt points, more even than a Jewish or Gypsy candidate, or a woman, as Hilary Clinton found out.

His politics of "change" are both amorphous and obviously fake, since he has the same lobbyists as the right and the last leftist candidate, and has already made some missteps that show he's most interested in business as usual.

He has connections to shady construction deals, a race-baiting organization called ACORN that also helped bring about the mortgage mess, and of course, to some radical groups of the racial nationalist variety. We wouldn't tolerate THAT in a white or Jewish candidate, nor would we very much like a femme panther.

Politics by image is doomed to fail, and this is no exception. The problem is that when you don't tackle problems, you only find out the results decades later, when the situation collapses. If you do take on hard problems, people can hate you immediately.

Ariely's analysis is rooted in studies he and others have done involving trust games.

They work something like this: Two individuals are each given $10. The first participant can give his partner the money, and when doing so that $10 quadruples into $40, meaning the partner now has 50 bucks. Why would you just give away money? It has to do with trust, because then the partner has the choice of either splitting the money with the giver or taking it all for himself. Many players do give away their money and end up getting the split amount back, Ariely said.

But not everyone is so trustworthy and reciprocating. So the game has a revenge twist. The giver can choose to use his own money to get back at the other player for not sharing the $50. For every $1 out of the giver's pocket, the greedy player takes a hit of $2.

"The first thing that is surprising is that people actually take revenge [even though] revenge is costly," Ariely said...Ariely referred to a group of Swiss researchers who have found that when players take revenge, the same part of the brain normally triggered by reward lights up.

Sometimes, ethnic differences can pose risks for a couple. I was quite surprised by a new finding showing that Asian women married to white men had a 30 percent higher rate of cesarean sections compared with Asian or white couples and white women married to Asian men. The researchers gave a plausible reason why: Previous studies have shown that the average Asian woman's pelvis is smaller than the average white woman's and thus less able to accommodate babies of a certain size. "We're certainly not concluding that these women always need C-sections," says study coauthor Yasser El-Sayed, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Stanford University Medical Center. But he would be less likely to allow a prolonged labor to continue for hours in such women because a vaginal delivery would be very unlikely.

The study, published in the October issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, also found that pregnant women who were part of an Asian-white couple had a higher rate of gestational diabetes than those who were part of a white-white couple, a nearly 4 percent risk compared to a 1.6 percent risk for white couples. Asian couples, known to have higher rates of diabetes, had nearly a 6 percent risk. What's intriguing is that white women married to Asian men also had higher rates of gestational diabetes compared with those married to white men, possibly due to a genetic characteristic in the fetus that triggers some sort of interaction with the mother. "It could be that these women should be screened in the first trimester for gestational diabetes instead of waiting until 24 to 28 weeks, but we'll need additional studies before we know that for certain," says El-Sayed.

You rarely see it expressed this clearly, but each race and ethnicity is a divergence from the evolutionary tree into specialized territory. Mix specialized things, and you get confusion, then an average.

I find this movie amazing, because although it's clearly a joke, it captures what it must be like to be totally different from the people around you. What Otherness is.

In our current time, when so much of truth is either taboo or in contention between our divided societies, those who want -- well, not Truth in some metaphysical sense -- realism, pragmatism or truth must feel a lot like the inhabitants of this space ship.

We're aliens among our own tribe.

This movie captures that sick feeling for me, and makes me smile at it. As a result, I have to say it's a great work of art.

Wise is basically playing an old marketing con: appeal to the individual through emotion, specifically their own desire for sympathy in an unfair circumstance.

We all know that African-Americans have gotten the short end of the stick; what we won't all talk about is whether that condition has arisen because of a difference between African- and European-descended populations.

It's interesting to note that North Asian immigrants to the USA have integrated seamlessly and succeeded, as have other previously marginalized groups like Jews, Italians, Irish and metalheads.

So there's more to the issue than "discrimination." We know for example that race, class and individual differences between intelligence are largely genetic. We know that cultural differences are profound. We also know that the Black Panthers were right: no Black man is going to feel happy being ruled by whites, and vice versa.

These issues are simply not discussed in our society, except in some odd corners of the internet. They contravene not only state dogma, but popular dogma, which is that marketing I talked about in paragraph one up there. Like talking about death and the absence of proof of heaven, talking about race-genetics and the failure of multiculturalism is not only unpopular, but offensive and for that reason, taboo.

Like all big suppressions, of course, this discussion leaves nothing but destruction in its wake. So let's see what Mr. Todd Wise and his fellow writers at Red Room do with the above comment -- if they even post it.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

You actually do us all a real disservice with your tiresome, tedious politics. For in fact, there is nothing more important than politics. NOT the politics of American "democracy" and law, of who is elected state legislator to sign the same bills and perpetuate the same system. Not the politics of the "I got involved with the radical left because I enjoy quibbling over trivial details and writing rhetorically about an unreachable utopia" anarchist. Not the politics of any leader or ideology that demands that you make sacrifices for "the cause." But the politics of our everyday lives. When you separate politics from the immediate, everyday experiences of individual men and women, it becomes completely irrelevant. Indeed, it becomes the private domain of wealthy, comfortable intellectuals, who can trouble themselves with such dreary, theoretical things. When you involve yourself in politics out of a sense of obligation, and make political action into a dull responsibility rather than an exciting game that is worthwhile for its own sake, you scare away people whose lives are already far too dull for any more tedium. When you make politics into a lifeless thing, a joyless thing, a dreadful responsibility, it becomes just another weight upon people, rather than a means to lift weight from people. And thus you ruin the idea of politics for the people to whom it should be most important. For everyone has a stake in considering their lives, in asking themselves what they want out of life and how they can get it. But you make politics look to them like a miserable, self-referential, pointless middle class/bohemian game, a game with no relevance to the real lives they are living out.

What should be political? Whether we enjoy what we do to get food and shelter. Whether we feel like our daily interactions with our friends, neighbors, and coworkers are fulfilling. Whether we have the opportunity to live each day the way we desire to. And "politics" should consist not of merely discussing these questions, but of acting directly to improve our lives in the immediate present. Acting in a way that is itself entertaining, exciting, joyous—because political action that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives. No more time should be wasted debating over issues that will be irrelevant when we must go to work again the next day. No more predictable ritual protests that the authorities know all too well how to deal with; no more boring ritual protests which will not sound like a thrilling way to spend a Saturday afternoon to potential volunteers—clearly, those won't get us anywhere. Never again shall we "sacrifice ourselves for the cause." For we ourselves, happiness in our own lives and the lives of our fellows, must be our cause!

The writer of this essay has a point: leftist politics fail because they're guilt-oriented, and based in the individual's need to justify a failing ego, and so they do not aim at real solutions.

Even worse, they turn life into dogma-based obligation, like it was in the Soviet Union.

When I was a leftist, I believed that by making good arguments to others, we could save the world and make it less cruel and more fair. Later on, I saw how this made no sense. The plans of leftists would not have realized their goals, and in the process, they would have turned everyone into a dogma-bound leftist activist. I saw quickly that leftism was a cancer that would drown us.

If you want the poor to be better off, or minorities to be better off, design a better society on a practical level. That may mean, for example, that ethnic nationalism and traditional culture are needed; minorities may be better off on other continents. For the poor to be better off, you may need a caste system. The poor will be better off when they don't buy what their TVs tell them to, and so always live in debt. Thinking outside the box is anathema to leftism, because they like the same tired solutions that have failed for centuries, because they don't care if anything gets done. It's a social fashion, an identity, a passtime.

Once you start reading history, you see that all politics exist in the crossover between pragmatics and playfulness that this author describes. We call it conservatism now, but it's not a thing as much as it is a range of political solutions based in pragmatic, real-world focus. Leftism cannot comprehend it because leftism has never contemplated the real world, and that's why they bore us all with their archaic, deathbound dogma.

4. Get rid of squid -- Squid is my word for people who seem to be missing their backbones but possess myriad sucking tentacles of emotional need. Like many invertebrates, squid appear limp and squishy -- but once they get a grip on you, they're incredibly powerful. Masters at catalyzing guilt and obligation, they operate by squeezing pity from everyone they meet.

Getting a squid out of your life is never pretty. Tell them straightforwardly that you want them, yes them, to leave now, yes, now. This will be unpleasant. There will be lasting hurt feelings. Don't worry. Squid love hurt feelings. They hoard them, trading them in for pity points when they find another victim -- er, friend. Let them go, their coffers bulging.